Like being asphyxiated in a ball pit filled with candy, the experience of watching The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is at once kaleidoscopic and nerve-wracking. It pantomimes the hallmarks of a good time, with a fast, forced cheeriness; the flashing lights, bright colors, sparkly design, and subplot-happy narrative are there to hold our attention and charm us, but they accomplish the opposite, instead making us worry about what we’re missing.

Five Nights at Freddy’s, the movie, is the kind of hollowed-out exercise in atrociousness that pretty much forces you to mull other things, be they what you’re having for dinner, the decline of American community, or the heat death of the universe.

Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.

The Scargiver plays like a screensaver. Its shots are littered with lens flares and aesthetically pleasing smoke, with the contrast of golden light and planted fields alongside spacecraft and gas giants on the horizon. It would be just as evocative as a carousel of stills on an unused monitor, or maybe more so, given that the stills wouldn’t be accompanied by ponderous dialogue.

The first Scream skewered Hollywood cynicism. The latest embodies it.

What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.

Wealth does not confer decency and should not excuse noxious behavior, and it is not a replacement for a soul. But it is, apparently, the final answer to the question in the movie's title.

Watching it feels more like being frog-marched through a wax museum than watching a movie, each milestone restaged with an off-putting, uncanny-valley resemblance and no interiority.

It’s just plain offensive — and not all that well made, either. No Escape takes the casual xenophobia of something like Taken, crossbreeds it with something altogether more noxious, then asks us to kick back and enjoy the ride. We don’t. We can’t. And the ride isn’t that great to begin with.

The film is one-half Sound of Metal and one-half Misery: Unfortunately, those movies already exist.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is a pompous, interminable hash.

What’s Terminal about? It’s about 90 minutes. That’s a cheap shot, but since the film doesn’t establish a baseline of reality, it’s hard to pick out a premise. It’s a series of playlets stitched together with the seams hanging out.

Rabbit Test’s failure is understandable: It’s pretty much a terrible movie. Directed more like a sitcom than a film and full of dud jokes that feel like they’re waiting for a laugh track to kick in, it’s a good example of how the comedian’s ten-wisecracks-a-second humor didn’t necessarily translate to a narrative medium.

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

Smith is a stunt coordinator and performer, a background that’s led to some great action fare in other contexts, but in this one, produces a mess of chopped-to-bits showdowns that sometimes seem to be missing coverage.

In The Best of Me, the melodrama feels so hurried and half-baked that the end result isn’t just disappointing. It’s borderline infuriating.

John Herzfeld, the writer-director, attacks America's lust for voyeuristic sensationalism by aping the very tactics he decries.

If Rock ever comes to his senses, he can host Saturday Night Live and skewer this damp, gag-riddled civics lesson of a movie.

What’s onscreen — choppy, lifeless, predictable action scenes jutting up against unbaked, middle-school-theater-production-level family drama — is quite damning in its own right.

Appalling in ways that you could never have anticipated. The movie mixes mismatched-buddy high jinks with scenes of carnage.

This hodgepodge has been thrown together in so slovenly a way that it’s no surprise the studio didn’t show it to the press.

Before I go into the grinding awfulness of Dumb and Dumber To, let’s get one damn thing straight: The original Dumb and Dumber is a clasick.

It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person.

Harold and the Purple Crayon makes the classic Hollywood mistake of taking a story that was lovely because of its concision and simplicity and turns it into a movie that is overly long and complicated for no good reason.

The line between a movie and an advertisement has gotten increasingly blurry — movies used to be a way to sell toys, but now toys have become the sole basis of movies. But Gran Turismo, in its texturelessness, the lack of joy in its depictions of gameplay, its too-sleek race footage and void of a main character, is particularly egregious in what it’s doing.

Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.

It offers a deranged hodgepodge of tones and acting styles and strange mannerisms and affectations and narrative dead ends that feels like it was assembled by a committee of bipolar extraterrestrials.

There’s nothing grounding enough here; everything — the sets, the costumes, the performances — seems to drift off in a CGI haze. As a contender for cherished childhood mythology, its methods are cheap. And as a mere child distractor, it seems awfully expensive.